“Educational neglect”: When education bureaucrats and the family police team up to traumatize a family

Just reading about what Michelle Fraser had to do to get her son Jacob the special education services he needed and to which he was entitled under state and federal law is exhausting. To actually do what she did is a true testament to strength, resilience, and most of all a mother’s love for a son who is autistic, has epilepsy and is unable to speak. 

It happened year after year after year after year after year after year after year after year after year – every year from at least 2015 through 2023. The New York City public school system would deny Jabob the special education he needed and propose an alternative. Each year, Michelle Fraser would check out the school system’s proposed alternatives. One year, she even checked herself out of a hospital after major surgery to visit a school which, it turned out, didn’t have what Jacob needed – and didn’t have an opening for Jacob anyway. 

Each year, Fraser would appeal to an independent hearing officer. Each year, she would win her case. Jacob would get the education he needed to thrive.  Until the next school year, when it would start all over again. 

Apparently, this proved tiring for the school system, too.  But they had a secret weapon: The Administration for Children’s Services, New York City’s family police agency. They allegedly filed a blatantly false report. The allegation against the mother who fought so hard to get her child an education: educational neglect. 

But Fraser wouldn’t back down. Even in the face of the investigation, which traumatized the entire family, Fraser kept fighting. And now, she’s the plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by the Family Justice Law Center and two private law firms, Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP, and Peter Romer-Friedman Law PLLC. 

Though Fraser is the named plaintiff, the lawsuit isn’t just about her case, because Fraser’s family is not the only one put through this hell. The lawsuit alleges that staff from the city’s Department of Education 

are reporting parents of students with disabilities in retaliation for their advocacy—to intimidate or coerce “difficult” parents into dropping their concerns about special education services or requests for placement in a different school. 

Even a former ACS attorney has said: 

 “If schools don’t get the parents to agree to what’s being recommended—not all the time, but sometimes—they will call ACS to pressure them.” 

And indeed, according to the lawsuit, in Fraser’s case, 

Defendants reported Plaintiff to the [New York State child abuse hotline], falsely and maliciously alleging that her son had not been attending school for years. Later, the reporter told an ACS caseworker that she had actually called the [hotline] because the “stalemate” with Plaintiff had “been going on too long” and her supervisor “wanted ACS involved.” 

This kind of behavior has been well documented for years in news accounts from, among others, The 74 and The Hechinger Report.  And not just in New York. The Hechinger Report stories document cases in Illinois as well as New York. Searchlight New Mexico documented the problem in that state. And the Boston Globe documented how such charges were used to harass families during the COVID pandemic - but not all families. 

Many states don’t even include “educational neglect” in the jurisdiction of their family police agencies. And, indeed, as far back as 2009, the respected Vera Institute of Justice said it should be drastically curbed, if not abolished, in New York as well. 

What is different now is that, thanks to the Family Justice Law Center and its partners, families can fight the entire regime of retaliation. 

What the lawsuit tells us about ACS 

Though ACS itself is not a defendant in the case, the lawsuit also reveals a lot about that agency’s failure, on several fronts. 

● First, ACS has refused to seek the state legislation that could have allowed it to refuse to be a party to DOE’s retaliation scheme. In New York, the state runs the child abuse hotline, but localities do the investigating. That creates a huge incentive for the state hotline to funnel b.s. reports on to the localities – making it someone else’s problem. 

One partial solution would be to allow localities to do their own screening, something that already happens for most cases in Pennsylvania, which has a similar system. 

But ACS has refused to ask the state for permission to do the same. Perhaps it just prefers to be able to pass the buck and say “the state made us do it” in cases like that of the Fraser family. 

● Second, ACS is fond of touting its version of “differential response” known as CARES. These cases supposedly get a kinder, gentler approach.  It’s not an investigation, they say, it’s just an “assessment.” 

When there’s a full-scale investigation, caseworkers ask children about the most intimate details of their lives, let everyone the family deals with know they’re under investigation for child abuse and search every room in their homes.

Let’s go back to the lawsuit Complaint to compare that to the Fraser case – which was assigned to the CARES track. 

Plaintiff received a call from her daughter, who was upset and said there was a strange man walking around outside their home. 

Plaintiff then discovered she had a voicemail from an ACS caseworker, Nikunj Patel. He was investigating a report that her son had not been attending school. 

Plaintiff immediately returned home with her son. Mr. Patel was still outside the house. Mr. Patel demanded to see every room in the house, including private outdoor areas where Plaintiff’s son liked to spend time as well as the bedrooms of both of Plaintiff’s children. He also said he needed to see the children’s medical records. 

The caseworker’s visit was very upsetting for Plaintiff’s son and caused him to cry in distress and retreat outside while the caseworker was in the home. 

Although this baseless ACS report concerned only Plaintiff’s son, the caseworker also interrogated her daughter, a competitive student athlete, with invasive questions about her family home, whether she felt undue parental pressure to engage in sports, and whether her mother ever yelled at her. 

After the visit, Plaintiff called the head of her daughter’s school, officials at the YMCA that hosts her son’s school program, and her children’s doctors to alert them that ACS may be contacting them, after the caseworker told her that he would be calling people who regularly interacted with the children. She felt embarrassed to have to tell people that she was being investigated for child neglect, and she experienced constant anxiety while the investigation remained pending. 

After a comprehensive investigation that included the home search and conversations with the children’s schools, doctors, and father, ACS found that no child abuse or neglect had taken place and raised no concerns about the children’s welfare. ACS closed the investigation. [Emphasis added.] 

Fraser’s daughter told the Daily News how it had all affected her: 

“I walked into school I think days later,” said Mia. “All I could think to myself was, I don’t want this to become a public thing. I don’t want my friends to know. I don’t want my teachers to know.” 

Years later, Mia, now 16, is more open about the experience — but she still thinks about the trauma that it caused. 

“I did mention it in one of my college essays,” she added. “One of my drafts was about the incident, and how all I could think about in the entirety of the situation was, what’s going to happen to my brother?” 

But hey, at least it was just an assessment and not an investigation, right? 

Still, the “assessment” did lead to one useful bit of information. Again, from the lawsuit complaint: 

During an initial call, the ACS caseworker asked the psychologist the reason for not reporting Plaintiff’s son’s absence from school until June 2023, if he had not been in school since 2016.

The caseworker documented the psychologist’s response: that Plaintiff “has taken legal action against DOE, she has constantly requested Re-evaluations, and Impartial hearing” and that Plaintiff has a legal background and “is very by the book, and strict in her speaking.” 

Another failure for the “training” panacea 

No matter how much harm family police do to families, no matter how egregious their behavior, they will insist everything can be fixed with “more training.” They’ve been saying that for decades, and during that time, the child welfare surveillance state has grown to its current massive proportions. 

Yet both ACS and DOE insist that the harm done to the Fraser family and so many others can be fixed with more training. Let’s return to the lawsuit complaint to see how that’s working out: 

Defendant DOE has acknowledged that educators have been overreporting to the [child abuse hotline]. Since the report against Plaintiff, DOE has begun work with ACS to develop a training module indicating that reports to ACS in retaliation for advocacy are unlawful and encouraging staff to check their biases and connect families with services. … 

OK, let’s just stop there. DOE says its employees need special training to know it’s against the law (not to mention morally wrong) to call in a child abuse report as an act of retaliation? Really? 

The training material also informs DOE employees that “Just because you disagree with a parent’s decisions or actions does not mean a child is being abused or maltreated.” And the new material reminds employees that there is an actual DOE regulation prohibiting retaliation. 

However, as the Complaint points out 

There is no evidence to indicate that the updated guidance and trainings have resulted in a decrease in retaliatory reports from educators against parents who advocate for services. Indeed, upon information and belief, some DOE employees have continued to retaliate against parents who advocate for their children with disabilities even after DOE began training staff in fall 2023 that “a call to the SCR is an option of last resort.” 

No, training isn’t going to do the job. But a hefty damage award in this lawsuit might.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending January 20, 2026

● We begin with the news we broke on this blog yesterday afternoon: The federal government’s annual Child Maltreatment report is out. It shows a significant decline in child abuse fatalities, even as foster care entries fell. 

● And on the same topic, from Rutgers University: More about the blockbuster study finding that taking away more children does nothing to reduce the number of child abuse fatalities. 

● In New York City, you can always count on Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post to demand that the city’s family police agency get ever more power to tear apart ever more families. Last week, the Post reported on the horrific tragedy that followed when the agency performed exactly as the Post’s editors and opinion columnists demand. They won’t learn anything from it, but the rest of us might. 

● Last year, Minnesota passed landmark legislation that, when it takes effect, will make all of the state’s children safer.  The Imprint reports on a committee’s recommendations concerning what needs to happen next: 

The 22-member advisory panel that released its report this month included community members, state and county leaders and nonprofit directors. In 111 pages, they detailed what the Department of Children, Youth and Families, the state Legislature and counties need to do to fully enact the Minnesota African American Family Preservation and Child Welfare Disproportionality Act. 

● Next time you hear that family police agencies never intrude on families because of poverty “alone” consider what happens in Washoe County, Nev. For homeless families in that county, the act of accepting help – and nothing else – can lead to an automatic referral to the family police. I have a blog post about it. 

● You often hear that in the family policing system families are guilty until proven innocent. But for Toia Potts, even being proven innocent wasn’t enough. Two of her children had their right to live with her terminated. She tells her story in Inquest magazine.

● Georgia recently passed a Reasonable Childhood Independence law. But, as Lenore Skenazy writes in Reason, that wasn’t enough to stop an Unreasonably Paranoid Caseworker from traumatizing a family. Now their child is afraid to go out of the house alone, not because of any supposed danger from strangers, but because of fear of another traumatic investigation by the family police. The family must operate under a so-called safety plan. In contrast, there is no indication anything like that has happened in this other Georgia case, where the alleged offense is vastly more serious. 

● Five years ago, Arizona signed a consent decree promising to reduce the proportion of children placed in the worst form of “care” – group homes and institutions. But now, KNXV-TV reports, a mediator has found that the proportion actually has gone up. But then, given Gov. Katie Hobbs’ willingness to lavish state funds on such places, that shouldn’t come as any surprise. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● From The Imprint: 

After a 25-year fight for accountability, a former foster youth has been awarded $5.5 million to settle his case against the county that placed him with his adoptive father — a man who was once the chief pediatrician for foster kids in Silicon Valley. 

Dozens of children in foster care and multiple boys who lived in Dr. Patrick Clyne’s home when he was a licensed foster parent have accused him of sexual abuse, and he has been the subject of criminal investigations dating back to 2001. To date, he denies wrongdoing and has not been charged with any crime related to the allegations. …

Latest federal data show significant decline in child abuse fatalities, even as foster care entries fell

The latest federal compilation of data from the states concerning child abuse and neglect shows that known child abuse fatalities declined significantly in 2024 compared to the previous year. It’s also the second decline in a row, following a smaller decline from 2022 to 2023. Overall, known fatalities during the two-year period declined by 12%. 

That’s probably the most significant finding in the latest Child Maltreatment report released Friday by the federal Administration for Children and Families (and yes, 2024 is the latest). 

During that same period – 2022 through 2024 – entries into foster care nationwide declined by about six percent. 

Did the decline in foster care entries cause the decline in child abuse deaths? Almost certainly not. Correlation is not causation. But that’s also true when foster care entries go down and child abuse deaths go up – yet foster care apologists love to exploit those data points over and over – carefully picking and choosing among them. 

Foster care apologists also will rush to point out that, they claim, child abuse deaths are underreported. They may be right. There also are reasons to believe they can be overreported. 

Consider a hypothetical example: Early one Sunday morning, while his parents are asleep, a three-year-old wakes up, manages to unlatch the back door of the family home and wanders away.  He falls into a body of water and drowns. Accident or neglect? The history of American family policing suggests that if the body of water is the pool behind a McMansion it will be labeled an accident. If it’s a pond behind a trailer park it will be labeled neglect.

But whichever may be the case, there is no evidence that agencies were, say, 12% more likely to overlook fatalities in 2024 than in 2022. 

All this is all the more reason it’s a good thing a massive new study has settled the issue once and for all. The study looked at 3.4 million case records and more than 20,000 child abuse deaths over a period of 13 years. The result: No evidence whatsoever that increasing foster care reduces child abuse deaths. And no evidence that reducing foster care increases child abuse deaths. 

For a full discussion of why that might be, and a discussion of what actually can reduce child abuse deaths, see this earlier post to the blog and NCCPR’s Issue Paper on child abuse fatalities. 

And in contrast, let us never forget the new study from Sweden finding that, when compared to comparably maltreated children left in their own homes, children placed in foster care were more than four times more likely to die by age 20. 

Other notable data from the Child Maltreatment report: 

● For the first time since at least 2015, the number of calls to child abuse hotlines declined – ever so slightly. Perhaps the public is starting to understand that both underreporting the very rare cases of genuine, serious abuse and overreporting everything else harms children. Perhaps people are being a little more careful – and more willing to become, in Joyce McMillan’s phrase, mandatory supporters instead of mandatory reporters. 

● The rate at which caseworkers checked boxes on forms saying they believed it was at least slightly more likely than not that the allegation is true (that’s all a “substantiated” report of child abuse or neglect really means) declined for the sixth year in a row.

A Nevada County forces families to gamble with their children’s lives

 The county offers families a cruel choice – and effectively admits they DO police families for poverty “alone.” 

Over and over, family policing apologists tell us they don’t police families because of poverty “alone.” It’s always some other issue. There are two problems with that: 

● First, the other issues often are caused by poverty and/or can be alleviated with money – instead of putting the family under traumatic surveillance or tearing the family apart entirely. 

● Second, every few months, somewhere in America, someone in the family police effectively admits that yes – they do intervene because of poverty alone. 

In Washoe County, Nevada (metropolitan Reno), in some cases, it’s agency policy. 

In that county, here’s the choice homeless families face when the county-run shelter is full: Accept an offer of a place at a hotel, and face an automatic investigation by the county family police agency. Reject the offer, stay homeless, or find something on their own, and stay free of having the family police in their lives. 

Here’s how the Nevada Current reported it: 

Washoe County operates a 38-private room facility for families with children called Our Place Shelter. 

If the shelter runs out of space and families have no other housing options, the county can offer to pay for a hotel room. Accepting the assistance to stay in a hotel comes with an automatic referral to child welfare, said Sabrina Sweet, a human services coordinator with Washoe County. [Emphasis added.] 

The county had no data on how many times the referral led to foster care. The county also had no data on how many families refused the help because of their fear of a family police investigation. 

And while they have the resources to send an investigator, they somehow don’t have the resources to provide help to the families in the hotels. From the story: 

“We don’t have the bandwidth to go out into the motels,”[Tara Sterrett, a human services supervisor] said. “Once we put them in a motel, we don’t really have the ability to go in and say, ‘Okay, now what is it that’s keeping you from being able to provide for your kids?’” 

The county also admits it knows what’s generally keeping homeless families from being able to provide for their kids – and it’s not primarily drug abuse, mental illness or domestic violence – the big three excuses foster-care apologists cling to when it’s pointed out that they take away children because their families are poor. As the story explains: 

The high cost of rents and the lack of affordable places to live are driving people into homelessness in Washoe just like the rest of the state – as well as the country. 

“One of the biggest barriers is affordable housing, especially for families,” Sterrett said. 

The larger the family, the more challenging it becomes for them to find adequate housing.  

“It’s really hard to find an apartment that’s going to be large enough that they’re going to be able to afford and sustain,” Sterrett said. [Emphasis added.] 

So now let’s consider how the county might deal with that. The average monthly rent in Reno is $1,462.  So: What if the county paid a rent subsidy of a bit less than that, say only $858 per month, per child, to every homeless family?  That would go a long way toward reducing homelessness. 

Why $858?  Because that’s the minimum amount Washoe County will pay foster parents (tax-free, by the way) for every child – and it can go much higher, if they take a child from, say, a family that accepted the offer of housing in a hotel only to have that child taken away. 

All this may help explain why Nevada tears apart families at a rate 46% above the national average, even when rates of family poverty are factored in.  

Sure, they’re fond of gambling in Reno. But the stakes should never be whether a family is destroyed.

NCCPR news and commentary round-up, week ending January 13, 2026

 

 ● Of course, the biggest news of the past week is the publication of a blockbuster study on the relationship between the number of children family police agencies take away and child abuse deaths: The key finding: There is no relationship. Taking more children does not reduce child abuse deaths. Taking fewer children does not increase child abuse deaths. That means the “logic” behind America’s massive child welfare surveillance state collapses like a house of cards. I have a blog post with a link to the study and a discussion of things that really can reduce child abuse deaths. 

● There’s still another problem with the fanatical push by some take-the-child-and-run extremists to confiscate any child supposedly born with drugs in their system. In addition to the enormous, needless trauma this inflicts on children during the most important days of their lives, their first, in addition to driving women away from giving birth in hospitals and seeking prenatal care, in addition to the huge problem of false positive tests, ProPublica now reveals another: What constitutes a positive test result? There’s no uniform scientific standard. States are free to set any standard they want, or just let the testing lab decide. The result: 

The amount of opiates that upended [one new mother’s] life … was so minuscule that if she were an Air Force pilot, she could have had 200 times more in her system and still have been cleared to fly. 

● Massachusetts throws children into foster care at a rate 44% above the national average and institutionalizes children at a rate 80% above the national average. In this commentary for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, NCCPR rebuts those who want to make things even worse. 

● The Center Square has an update on that case in Georgia in which a man was arrested for allegedly driving very, very drunk with his young children in the car, but the children were not taken away – and the police may not even have called in a report to the state child welfare agency. But they did call the head of the agency – to come pick up the kids, since her husband was the alleged drunk driver. Here’s how their story begins: 

In at least one way, Georgia’s child welfare agency has treated its chief administrator just like any other parent involved in a possible child endangerment investigation. 

By not disclosing anything about the case publicly at all. 

Nevertheless, The Center Square turned up some new information, and I’ve updated NCCPR’s blog post on the case to include it.

● Rhode Island’s family police agency plans to spend up to $26 million to buy and renovate the notorious "House of Pine-Sol" RTC and warehouse 16 girls there. I have a blog post about it. 

● The Indiana Capital Chronicle reports that Indiana is the latest state where a “reasonable childhood independence” bill has cleared a legislative committee. 

In this week’s edition of The Horror Stories Go in All Directions: 

● From Honolulu Civil Beat:

As Civil Beat was reporting last year on a foster dad who sexually preyed on and beat the boys in his care, the state intervened to prevent the release of court documents that detailed how it could have happened. … Now those documents are public. And they offer a rare glimpse into the workings of the child welfare system, and how a predator could go unchecked for more than two decades. 

● From the Spokane Spokesman-Review: 

A Spokane girl was hit, neglected and sexually assaulted by her foster family for seven years as state workers documented the abuse but failed to remove her from the home, a new lawsuit against the state alleges.

NCCPR in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette: A better approach for state child care

If you really want to fix a child welfare system, the solution is simple: Listen to your gut instinct – and do the opposite. 

Gut instinct says: Another child has died in a case where the file had more “red flags” than a Soviet May Day parade. So, it must be because the Massachusetts Department of Children & Families is fanatically devoted to preserving families and we need to rush to take away even more children. 

The data, and a massive new study, tell a different story and suggest the need for a different solution. … 

Read the full column in the Telegram & Gazette

The Rhode Island approach to Child Welfare: Throw away the money, throw away the kids!

The Rhode Island family police agency wants to spend up to $26 million 
to buy and renovate a residential treatment center that closed after revelations 
of widespread abuse. At the time, a state lawmaker said she could tell things 
were getting better because "I could smell the Pine-Sol

The state family police agency plans to spend up to $26 million to buy and renovate the notorious "House of Pine-Sol" RTC

Here’s what the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth and Families wants to do with the now-closed hellhole institution known as St Mary’s Home for Children (or as it should be known, for reasons discussed below, the House of Pine-Sol):

 Spend $760,000 to buy what would have been a privately-run residential treatment center. Spend up to another $25 million to renovate the entire place and fix environmental problems.  Use only three of the seven buildings on the eight-acre site. Warehouse 16 girls there. 

(If you’re wondering why 16? It’s because large institutions are so inherently harmful that if more than 16 children are in one at any given time, the federal Medicaid program won’t pick up part of the very expensive tab.) 

And those are just the renovation costs. When it was privately run, DCYF was paying the operators more than $1,000 per day per child!

Apparently, no one in DCYF can think of a better way to spend all that money. This also helps explain why Rhode Island spends on “child welfare” at the highest rate in America, well over triple the national average  -while getting such dismal results. 

Rhode Island lawmakers haven’t shown much concern for the kids (or maybe they just don’t understand what’s best for children and won’t do what it takes to learn). But might they at least rebel at the cost to taxpayers? Nah. We already know that some Rhode Island lawmakers are pretty easy to fool. 

Look what happened after first the state’s Office of Child Advocate and then the Boston Globe exposed the extent to which St. Mary’s was rife with abuse. As we wrote on this blog in February 2024:

After her definitely-not-a-surprise inspection, Rep. Patricia  Serpa says things are soooooo much better now!  How does she know?  She told WPRI-TV: 

“What I saw today was encouraging.  The facility is clean. I could smell the Pine-Sol, I could smell the fresh paint. The kids’ rooms were kids’ rooms — they were messy, but an organized messy.” 

Of course!  Everyone knows children are never abused in rooms that smell of Pine-Sol!  And who would ever want to run from a room that was freshly painted?   (Where was Serpa expecting to see kids stay – in dungeons?)  

[DCYF Director Ashley] Deckert took the tour too. Deckert, more than any other individual, has a vested interest in downplaying any problems at the places where her agency institutionalizes children.  And sure enough, she called the progress “tremendous.” She, too, made a point of saying the place “smells nice.”

But in the end, St. Mary’s couldn’t pass the smell test. After DCYF stopped parking children there, the place had to close.

So what lesson did DCYF learn from this? We’ll buy the place and run it ourselves!

The rationale is the one you’ve heard a million times before – and it’s still BS: Some children have such severe problems they simply can’t stay in a home. They have to be in a residential treatment center – but this will be better because we’ll call it a psychiatric residential treatment center – and now, Rhode Island doesn’t have any of those.

That’s supposedly why so many children are being sent to RTCs out of state.

But the real reason Rhode Island sends all those kids out of state is that Rhode Island tears apart families at a rate more than 80% above the national average, even when rates of child poverty are factored in.

Of all the Rhode Island children torn from their families and thrown into foster care in 2024, 80% percent did not involve even an allegation of physical or sexual abuse. In 65% of cases, there was not even an allegation of any form of drug abuse.  Far more common are cases in which family poverty is confused with “neglect.” 

Get the children who don’t need to be in foster care back home, and Rhode Island will have plenty of room in good, safe family foster homes for all the children who really need them. As for those children who supposedly can’t live in a home: They can – if you provide intensive wraparound services to the family or the foster family. That’s an intervention proven to work – as opposed to residential treatment, which, even when the institutions aren’t hellholes, has been proven time and time again to fail. 

Wraparound also is far less expensive than residential treatment. You can buy a whole lot of it for $26 million – which apparently is readily at hand at DCYF. 

As for what might be done with the St. Mary’s campus: 

In 2024, Rhode Island threw more children into foster care because of inadequate housing than because of physical and sexual abuse combined. So how about renovating the place and using all seven buildings for housing for families that might otherwise lose their children to foster care, .  with some other agency – not DCYF – in charge of it.  Or, it might be used for a residential program that really can work: inpatient drug treatment where parents are allowed to stay with their children. 

Just don’t forget to keep a little extra money around for Pine-Sol.